Fast Learner with trivial skill grinding (experimental)

Game Talk The Bunker
1

So I am not sure if this is unique to the experiemental or in the current stable, but since the last time I played I have noticed that skills now can not be trained very high by doing things that become “trivial” at a certain skill threshold. My question is this, does this in fact mean there is effectively a “skill cap” when the highest difficulty thing that you can train with becomes trivial? Does that occur for some skills or every skill if so?

The reason I ask is because I have always taken fast learner with the idea that for any given point in the game, it equates to having higher overall skills in the same time frame. If there is a cap in place however, that means that with patience I will eventually max out skills and no longer have any use for the trait, so in the long run I would rather trade it for something else.

2

Well, skill level 10 is virtually the cap (above that there is no balancing).

I think it’s just fine that there is a certain amount of “grinding” (reall life is grinding, after all), e.g. in mechanics, but not as much that you are busy doing repetitive tasks for the first three days.

3

You should turn off skill rust…

4

You can still achieve stupidly high combat skills, like level 20 at least.

5

I do have skill rust off at the moment. If combat skills can still increase uncapped then that is reason enough for me to keep using it since crafting/construction does not benefit much once you can make something without failing.

6

The eventual goal is to rebalance the learning system to a 1-10 scale, with it being basically impossible to go above that.

7

Aww. I kinda like the whole “never stop improving” thing though.

8

The whole point of skill rust was basically to keep people from reaching those points where their character was absurdly strong, but most players opted to turn it off because… well… it’s annoying. Nobody likes to lose their skills over time, even if it does kind of make sense realistically.

9

Problem was that it got to the point where folks had to manually grind out the practice. Example: Kevin can practice Tai Chi and maintain his Unarmed skill IRL, but he couldn’t in-game: he’d have to find something to beat up. Had kicked around the idea of a practice system but it never got traction.

10

Problem was that it got to the point where folks had to manually grind out the practice. Example: Kevin can practice Tai Chi and maintain his Unarmed skill IRL, but he couldn’t in-game: he’d have to find something to beat up. Had kicked around the idea of a practice system but it never got traction.[/quote]

Maybe that’s a good thing. You don’t necessarily want gameplay to begin to include routine things like practicing over and over to make sure your skills stay up there. That doesn’t make it more fun.

11

The thing is, it would basically turn time into a resource. Want to be an ultimate martial arts master? Sure, but once you reach that point you’ll need to spend time to maintain it. The point of a “practice system” would be to let you spend that time resource, but without it requiring the player to spend time.
It’d just be a matter of opening a menu and choosing something to practice and a duration. Practice martial arts for a few hours a day, even solo, and you’re going to get good pretty quickly, but if you stop you’re going to start losing your edge.
At the upper peak, it’s hard to find time to do anything else, especially if you’re trying to maintain other skills at a high level as well.

12

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:11, topic:7184”]The thing is, it would basically turn time into a resource. Want to be an ultimate martial arts master? Sure, but once you reach that point you’ll need to spend time to maintain it. The point of a “practice system” would be to let you spend that time resource, but without it requiring the player to spend time.
It’d just be a matter of opening a menu and choosing something to practice and a duration. Practice martial arts for a few hours a day, even solo, and you’re going to get good pretty quickly, but if you stop you’re going to start losing your edge.
At the upper peak, it’s hard to find time to do anything else, especially if you’re trying to maintain other skills at a high level as well.[/quote]
… Which is when it becomes important to have NPC buddies who can cover those other skills for you.

Assuming NPCs become less insane in the future, I’m going to assume that’s what you’re working towards.

13

At the same time though, no matter how rusty your skills are, you still don’t completely forget how to do things.

Also getting back into the swing of things doesn’t take nearly the same effort as getting there in the first place.

14

See http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=3728.msg53912#msg53912 for a better idea of where we’re going with skill practice.
tl;dr the way it is now is not representative of the way it will be, and we have a pretty fleshed out plan for how to proceed, so criticizing the current implementation isn’t very helpful.